Sorcerers of Majipoor

  Speaking mildly, though restraining himself was an effort, Prestimion said, “I am the Prince Prestimion of Muldemar, as I think you know. I have apartments within the Castle and I wish to have access to them. As do my companions here, whose names I think you also know.”

  The Hjort made a Hjortish nod. “I know you, Prince Prestimion. But nevertheless I am not permitted to open this gate, not for you nor anyone, until the Coronal is here.”

  “You hideous toad, this is the Coronal who stands here before you!” Gialaurys shouted, and rushed toward him with the fury of a maddened bull. “Down and give worship! Down and give worship!”

  Two guardsmen moved quickly in to protect the Hjort. Gialaurys seized one of them without an instant’s hesitation and hurled him headfirst through the air so that he fetched up against the guardhouse door. He struck it with a terrible cracking sound and lay still.

  The other, who was armed with a vibration-sword, went for his weapon but was slow in activating it: Gialaurys caught him by the left arm, spun him around, and yanked the arm sharply upward, snapping it like a twig. As the man began to crumple in shock, Gialaurys struck him hard across the throat, a sharp powerful blow with the edge of his hand, and he fell down motionless also on the plaza pavement.

  “Come on, the rest of you!” Gialaurys cried to the other guards, who stared in awe and astonishment at their two dead comrades. Gialaurys beckoned them challengingly to come toward him, but none of them moved.

  Septach Melayn, meanwhile, had his sword out and was dancing in a cold but sportive rage about the Hjort and the other chancellery man, moving with a theatrical flamboyance: artfully nipping out again and again at them with the tip of his blade, menacing them with taunting grimaces and lightly pinking them here and there without actually inflicting a serious wound. His long thin spidery arms flashed like pistons, lashing out tirelessly. There was no defense against him. There never was. The two chancellery men had their own swords drawn too, but they were flimsy ornamental ones with scarcely any substance, and they held them like the utter novices that they were. Septach Melayn, laughing, flicked the Hjorfs sword from his hand with a quick sidewise swipe of his own, and disarmed the spike-haired man just as easily an instant afterward.

  “Now,” he said, “I will draw one nice stripe after another down your flesh, until someone quickly chooses to open that gate for us.” And he began by cutting open the Hjort’s blue official jerkin from shoulder to waistband.

  An alarm was sounding somewhere. Shouts could be heard from behind the gate.

  The second chancellery man had turned and was trying to get past Gialaurys and the clutter of motionless guards standing between him and the guardhouse door. Septach Melayn raised his sword and began to bring it slicing down between the man’s shoulder blades; but the blow was interrupted by Prestimion, who drew his own sword from its sheath and tapped it against Septach Melayn’s. Septach Melayn halted his stroke and whirled about, slipping automatically into a posture of defense. But upon seeing that it was Prestimion who had interfered with him, he lowered his weapon.

  “This is idiocy,” Prestimion told him. “Back to the floater, Septach Melayn! We can’t fight the whole Castle. There’ll be a hundred guards here in another five minutes.”

  “So there will indeed,” said Septach Melayn with a smile. He gave the red-haired chancellery man a thrust in the rear with his boot to send him lurching toward the guardhouse, whirled the astounded Hjort around and shoved him in the same direction, and caught Gialaurys by the arm in time to keep him from charging the guardsmen once more. Svor, who had watched the entire incident from his usual safe position on the sidelines, now trotted forth and took Gialaurys by the other arm; and he and Septach Melayn led him away, while Gialaurys continued loudly swearing that he would wreak havoc on all and sundry foes.

  They reentered their floater, and Prestimion signaled to those in the other vehicles farther across the plaza to turn quickly and head back down the highway.

  “Where shall we go?” asked Septach Melayn.

  “Muldemar,” Prestimion said. “At least there the gate will be open for us.”

  6

  THE HIGH CITY of Muldemar lay nestled in a soft and greatly favored zone of the upper reaches of Castle Mount on the southeastern face of the mountain. Here a secondary peak, which in any other region of the planet would have been a considerable mountain in its own right, jutted up from the flank of the Mount to create on its inner slope a broad sheltered pocket, a great hollow fold where the soil was rich and deep and the waters that flowed from within the giant mountain came forth generously in a plenitude of springs and streams.

  The ancestors of Prince Prestimion’s ancestors had settled in this part of Castle Mount nine thousand years before, when the Mount was still a place where newcomers could stake out domains for themselves, and the Castle itself had not yet been begun. There were no princes in Muldemar then, only a family of ambitious farmers who had come up from the lowlands around Gebelmoal bearing grapevines of good quality that they hoped could be transplanted to the Mount.

  At Gebelmoal those vines had yielded a decent red wine of fair body and character; but on the Mount the alternation of sunlight and periods of cool mist was perfect for their cultivation, and it became quickly apparent, even from the earliest vintages, that the wine of Muldemar was going to be extraordinary in nature, thick and strong and complex, a wine for kings and emperors to cherish. The harvests were abundant, the yield of the grapes lavish, their flavor uniquely pungent and bright. And yet, so popular did the wine of Muldemar prove to be, it was centuries before the vineyards there could be expanded sufficiently to meet the demand, despite every effort of the proprietors to expand production. Until that day came when supply and demand were at last in balance, one had to place one’s order for Muldemar wine a decade or more in advance, and wait in turn, hoping that that year’s vintage would be up to the quality of its predecessors. It always was.

  Plain hardworking farmers will eventually turn into knights, and knights into counts and earls and dukes, and dukes into princes and sometimes kings, if only they stay prosperous and hold their land long enough. When that great hero of antiquity Lord Stiamot had in his later years transferred the royal capital from the High City of Stee on the slopes to the very summit of the mountain and built the first Castle there atop the Mount to celebrate his conquest of the Metamorph Shapeshifters, the ancestors of the ancestors of Prestimion had already come to hold noble rank as a reward for the quality of their wine and, perhaps, for the quantities of it that they had supplied to some earlier Coronal’s festivities. Lord Stiamot it was who transformed the Count of Muldemar into the Duke of Muldemar, supposedly out of delight over some special cask of wine that was served at the Castle’s dedication ceremony.

  Some later Coronal—the historical record was uncharacteristically undear on the point, and no one was quite sure whether it had been Lord Strum or Lord Spurifon or even Lord Thraym—had further ennobled the Muldemar duke of his time by making him a prince. But there were no greater titles to be seen on the family escutcheon. Never had there been a Coronal from the Muldemar line. Prestimion would have been the first, but for the intervention of Korsibar.

  “So I am not to be Lady of the Isle after all, it seems,” said Prestimion’s mother the Princess Therissa, with a smile that betrayed relief as well as regret, when Prestimion and his party had arrived at his family’s great hillside estate looking down over the broad sprawling acres of the huge Muldemar vineyard. “And I had already resigned myself to leaving this place too, and was beginning even to pack a few things for the journey. Well, it will be no hardship for me to remain here. Is it a great disappointment to you, Prestimion?”

  “I have had worse ones,” he said. “I was promised a racing-mount once, and then Father changed his mind and I received some set of fat history-books instead. I was ten years old then; the wound still festers in me.”

  They both laughed heartily. It had always been a clos
e and loving family here. Prestimion embraced his mother, who was twelve years a widow now but still seemed beautiful and young, with a serene oval face and glossy black hair that she wore tightly drawn back and braided behind. A simply designed jewel of the highest beauty and value rested on the bosom of her white gown: a huge and flawless pigeon’s-blood ruby, deep red tinged with purple, that was set in a hoop of gold with two sparkling little haiguseye stones mounted as companions beside it. It was the Muldemar Ruby, the gift of the Coronal Lord Arioc, that had been in the family four thousand years.

  But Prestimion noticed also that his mother wore an unfamiliar talisman encircling her left sleeve just by her wrist, a golden band inlaid with shards of emerald. It was something that might have seemed merely to be another ornament but for the fact that the emerald shards spelled out mystic runes. They were much like the runes carved on the little corymbor amulet that the Vroon Thalnap Zelnifor had given him in the Labyrinth, and which, mainly to humor Gialaurys and Duke Svor, Prestimion wore now around his neck on Septach Melayn’s golden chain. She had not had any such thing when he last saw her in the early part of the year.

  These witchery-things are everywhere now, Prestimion thought even here, even on his own mother’s arm. And not worn in jest, he suspected, as was the corymbor dangling by his throat.

  “What will you do now, Prestimion?” she asked as she walked with him to his rooms.

  “Now? Now I’ll rest here, and eat well and drink well and swim and sleep, and watch how the Coronal Lord Korsibar conducts himself on his throne. And consider my options, carefully and with much thought.”

  “You’ll abide by his stealing of the crown, then? For that is what he did, I hear: stole it, took it right out of his father’s own hand without the slightest show of shame. And Confalume allowing it just as shamelessly.”

  “He took it from the Hjort crown-bearer Hjathnis, in fact, while his father stood to one side all dumbfounded and amazed. And the others too, for they were every one under some spell that clouded their minds as it happened. Septach Melayn was there and saw it. But no matter: Korsibar has the crown. Confalume is unwilling to raise objection, or incapable of it, or both. The deed is done. The world accepts it. The people have raised banners in honor of Korsibar all along the Glayge. The Castle guards themselves turned me away at Dizimaule Arch: why do you think I am here, Mother, instead of there? They turned me away!”

  “That goes beyond all belief.”

  “So it does. But believe it anyway, Mother. I do. Korsibar is Coronal.”

  “I know that boy well. He’s brave and handsome and tall; but he lacks the capacity for the task. To look like a king is insufficient, he needs to be a king within. And he is not that.”

  “This is true,” said Prestimion. “But he has the crown. The Castle and the throne await him.”

  “A Coronal’s son may not follow his father that way. That is the ancient law.”

  “A Coronal’s son is doing that very thing, Mother, even as we stand here talking. And it is not law, only custom.”

  The Princess Therissa stared at Prestimion in flat amazement. “You astound me, Prestimion. Are you going to allow it to happen, without even a protest? You’ll do nothing at all?”

  “I said I would consider my options, Mother.”

  “Which means what?”

  “What I intend to do,” he said, “is summon certain high men of the kingdom here to Muldemar and sound them out, and learn from them how strong their support of Korsibar really is. I mean such as Duke Oljebbin, and Serithorn, and Gonivaul. And also, I think, Dantirya Sambail.”

  “That monster,” said the Princess Therissa.

  “A monster, yes, but a bold and powerful monster, and also, I remind you, a kinsman of ours. I’ll speak with these men. I’ll fill them full of our finest vintages and see if they are in Korsibar’s pocket, or can be pried free of him, yes or no, if they will give me an answer. And then I’ll form some plan for my future, if I’m to have one. But for now I am only Prince of Muldemar, and that in itself is no little thing.” He smiled and touched the talisman at his mother’s wrist. —“Is this new?” he asked.

  “I’ve had it these two months past.”

  “Elegant work. Who is the goldsmith?”

  “I have no idea. It was given me by the magus Galbifond. Did you know we have a magus here now?”

  “No.”

  “To help us foresee patterns of rainfall and mist, and to judge the proper day for picking the grapes. He’s an expert winemaker: knows all the true spells.”

  “The true spells,” Prestimion said, wincing. “Ah.”

  “He told me also that you would not become Coronal when the old Pontifex died. I learned that from him no more than five days after you set out toward the Labyrinth.”

  “Ah,” said Prestimion again. “It seems that everyone knew that except me.”

  There was no part of the vale of Muldemar that was anything less than lovely, but the vineyards and estate of the princes of Muldemar occupied the choicest position of all. The princely lands were situated in the best protected shelter, nestling up against the flank of the Mount itself, so close that it was impossible to see the Castle from the manor house, because one would have to look up almost straight overhead. Here only sweet winds blew and gentle mists came. And here, in the perpetually green domain between Kudarmar Ridge and the well-behaved little Zemulikkaz River, the lands of the princely family ran for mile after mile, culminating in the splendor and magnificence of Muldemar House itself, a great white-walled structure of two hundred rooms whose three main wings were topped with lofty black towers.

  Prestimion had been born at Muldemar House, but like most of the princes of the high families, had lived much of his life at the Castle, taking his education there and returning here only a few months out of the year. Since his father’s death he was technically the head of the family, and took care to be here on all major family occasions, but his rapid rise to the status of heir-presumptive to Lord Confalume had required his presence at the Castle much of the time in recent years.

  Now all that was over, and it was far from displeasing to be back in his own suite of rooms again. He had a generous private apartment within the house, on the second level, facing the sweeping vista of Sambattinola Hill. Long curving windows of faceted quartz carved by the subtlest craftsmen of Stee flooded the rooms with brilliant light; the walls of the rooms were lavishly covered with mural paintings in delicate pale tones, azure and amethyst and topaz pink, endless interwoven floral traceries in the intricate and curiously eye-tickling mode of the artisans of Haplior.

  Here Prestimion bathed and rested and dressed, and received visits from his three younger brothers. They had become virtual strangers to him after his long absence, and had grown almost beyond recognition in just this one year.

  Each of the three professed his fury at Korsibar’s villainous theft of the throne. Teotas, who at fifteen was the youngest, was the one most heated in his insistence that Prestimion make immediate war against Confalume’s lawless son, and most eager to die if need be in defense of his brother’s crown. Eighteen-year-old Abrigant, who stood head and shoulders above all his brothers, was nearly as vehement. Even the artful and paradox-loving Taradath, at twenty-three the closest to Prestimion’s age and thus far in life much more given to the writing of ironic verse than to mastering the skills of warfare, seemed aflame with a passion for vengeance.

  Prestimion embraced them all, and assured each in turn that he would play a prominent role in any action that might be undertaken. But he sent them away from him without having offered any clear indication of what kind of action that might be.

  In truth he had no idea. It was far too soon for the making of plans, if indeed there were any that needed making.

  He spent the first weeks of his return in pleasant idleness, and at times felt the pain of his bitter disappointment giving way to a lighter mood, the first he had known since the events at the Labyrinth.

&nbs
p; It seemed unwise to leave the estate at all and enter the great city of Muldemar adjacent to it, since he wanted neither to hear the people of Muldemar swearing allegiance to Lord Korsibar nor passionately urging him—for he would be easily recognized there—to make civil war on the usurper. So he passed his days swimming in the cool Zemulikkaz, and strolling in the park surrounding Muldemar House, and hunting bilantoons and khamgars in the family preserve. Septach Melayn and Gialaurys were in constant attendance on him; Svor also, a little later, for first he made a brief sojourn to the nearby city of Frangior, where there was a woman he liked to visit. When Svor came back from there he seemed dejected, and said to Prestimion, “It is all Korsibar out there. He has arrived at the Castle now and is kinging it in great glory there. His face is posted up everywhere in Frangior.”

  “And in Muldemar city too?” asked Prestimion.

  “Fewer posters there, but there are some. And some portraits of you also, though they keep getting taken down. There’s much sentiment in the city in your favor.”

  “I would expect so,” Prestimion said. “But I intend to give it no encouragement.”

  Sometimes in hours of solitude Prestimion browsed in Muldemar House’s capacious library, leafing through the books of history he had found so unwelcome as a boyhood gift. Their pages were full of vivid accounts of the deeds of heroes of ages past, the establishment of the Pontificate under Dvorn, and the bold exploration of Castle Mount in the days when it was still uninhabitable, and the war of Stiamot against the Shapeshifters, and the expeditions into the torrid south and the frigid north and across the uncrossable Great Sea. Prestimion’s eyes took on a blurry glaze as he turned past sheet upon sheet of the annals of Coronals and Pontifexes whose names meant little or nothing to him: Hemias, Scaul, Methirasp, Hunzimar, Meyk, and many a dozen more. But of previous usurpations of the throne he could find no mention at all.

  “Can it be,” he said to Svor one day, “that we are such a virtuous people that never once in thirteen thousand years before this has someone wrongfully seized the throne?”